The process of managing a fleet of vehicles for hire, such as taxis and limousines, and the associated business considerations, can be quite cumbersome. For example, for a taxi service that accepts passengers on the street on an ad hoc basis, the driver typically maintains a “trip sheet” which contains relevant information for his shift in the vehicle. The information includes information about each fare—starting location, ending location, time, fare amount, etc. This information has conventionally been captured manually by each fleet owner when the driver returns the vehicle at the end of the shift. It is also used as the basis for settlement between the driver and fleet manager, and the settlement process can be quite extensive and time consuming.
This method of data capture is inefficient and results in data loss, poor reporting, and errors in the basic analysis of trip data. In many locations, the number of vehicles permitted to carry passengers for hire is limited, and it is disadvantageous when the revenue attributable to a vehicle is not maximized.
There have been recent technological advances so that, for example, the location of fleet vehicles can be determined, in real-time or near real-time, and communications provided with passengers in each vehicle. The location information can be used to, for example, retrieve property left behind in a vehicle or identify a vehicle involved in an incident based on location and time of day. When passengers forget property in a vehicle, they typically can only provide the starting location, ending location, and approximate time of the trip. The communications may consist of Internet sessions or e-mail communications. The communications may also consist of advertisements that are initiated by a central distribution point and simultaneously pushed out to the vehicles over wireless communication links to be displayed to the passengers. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,227,475 issued to Provensano et al.
However, known methods are disadvantageous in several ways. Multimedia files can be quite large and there may be many vehicles in a fleet. The simultaneous or real-time mass distribution of advertisements or other types of multimedia content in a conventional manner to vehicle passengers puts a heavy load on the wireless communications links to the point that is impractical for large fleets. Another disadvantage is that the conventional manner assumes the vehicle is always available, when in fact a vehicle may be out-of-service or otherwise unavailable to receive the distribution at any point in time. The benefits of the conventional system are of relatively limited utility to the manager of the vehicle fleet. It would be advantageous to have methods, systems and software that optimizes the communications in real-time or near real-time in a manner that assists the management of the fleet vehicles. One example of improved management is the capture, communication and processing of data for an electronic trip sheet in real-time or near real-time.